I’ve been taking a break from “the News” lately, pretty much since the election. It just got too embarrassing to watch. Trump turned US politics into a reality TV show, and I’m only willing to dumb down so far. I figure that if anything important happens, someone will tell me. I have that trust because people tell me about it even when nothing important happens. It really surprises me how much people talk about national politics around here.

I mean, my dope yuppie friends have no respect for the law, and don’t pay income tax, but somehow feel invested in American democracy, and talk about it all the time. My homeless friends, on the other hand, suffer human and civil rights violations every day, get treated like second-class citizens, and endure daily harassment from law enforcement, but they are outraged that Russian hackers compromised the legitimacy of “our elections.” “The News” does this to people.

“The News” is the one thing that truly unites us as a nation. We learn to ignore our own reality in order to digest, internalize and regurgitate this unified national narrative we call “the News.” We have news 24/7/365 so that you never have to think about your own life. “The News” is always there for you, telling you what’s important, what you should think about, and how you should think about it, and because we follow “the News” so faithfully, “the News” defines our national debate, and sets our national agenda. By paying such close attention to “the News,” instead of what’s going on around us, we allow the media, corporate interests and lawmakers to ignore our reality as well.

Doesn’t it seem strange that “the News” gives you updates on all of the major stock indices, every half-hour at least, even though most of us don’t own stocks, and if we do, they are managed by someone else, in a 401K, mutual fund, or retirement account, so the information is not that relevant to that many people. On the other hand, why don’t we have up-to-date stats that tell us about our general well-being as a community. Why don’t they tell us, at 8:00am every morning, how many people slept outside that night? Tell us how many people had nothing to eat yesterday. Show us how people make ends meet. Why would anyone care whether the stock market was going up, if these indices keep sliding?

Instead, we let “the News” tell us how many people we have to throw overboard to buoy the economy, as gauged by the stock market. “The News” tells us why we should expect to lose our home if we get sick, and “the News” tells us why we should sacrifice our children to protect the investments of billionaires, but now “the News” has gone too far.

Today, “The News” is telling us to pay attention to Donald Trump. This goes beyond selling the American people on ridiculous ideas that work against their own interests. Paying attention to Trump amounts to stupidity for stupidity’s sake. Paying attention to Trump is like reading The Enquirer. You know that it is a waste of time, and that you are not learning anything, and that it won’t do any good to point out the inconsistencies in their stories, because telling the truth has never mattered to either of them. Why waste your life that way?

From my perspective, as a writer, “the News” helps me gauge what I can assume my readers know, and what rhetoric they are familiar with, but I don’t want to think about that anymore. I don’t want to know how dumb people have gotten these days, and listening to Trump isn’t going to make them any smarter. I thought a Trump presidency would be a goldmine for political satire, at least, but I don’t find Trump very funny at all. Satirizing Trump is like trying to satirize pro-wrestling. How do you make fun of someone who already makes a mockery of the office?

In many ways, Trump is already the perfect satirical president. He’s got the ego, the chauvinism, the poor taste and the obnoxiousness that everyone despises about America and Americans. He treats other people the way the US treats other countries, and he’s fat, ugly and vain, just like most Americans.

He’s really the perfect president because he so completely embodies what the United States stands for. When you realize that, you begin to understand that our problems are much deeper than our current president, and you won’t find the answers to them on “the News.”

Besides, we’ve got plenty of corrupt, greedy fascists right here in Humboldt County. Here, we talk about the Fascist in Chief, in Mara Lago, chiefly because we don’t want to talk about all of the sleazy shit that goes on around here. In that sense, talking about Trump is kind of like talking about the weather. Trump is what you talk about when you don’t want to talk about anything. Mostly, people don’t want to talk about anything, because that would require them to think about something, formulate an opinion about it, and invest enough of themselves in that opinion to state it out loud. I’m not sure that people have it in them anymore.

Nobody wants to talk about the housing crisis. Nobody wants to talk about the dead bodies and the missing people, the violent crime, the opiate crisis, the Hep-C epidemic, the human rights abuses and institutional violence going on right here in Humboldt County, stuff we could actually do something about Nobody wants to talk about those things because nobody wants to think about those things, because mostly, they’re too busy scheming their own next crime against humanity. Instead, they tell me what Trump did, because they saw it on “the News.”

While pot industry shills like Hezekiah Allen warn of mass unemployment and economic hardship without continued taxpayer subsidized price supports for marijuana, we should realize by now that drug dealers will say anything to keep the cash rolling in. In truth, government price support programs for marijuana don’t support our local economy, here in Humboldt County, so much as they suppress it.

The War on Drugs created a windfall of profits for anyone who produces marijuana. This windfall buried our real economic potential, which we never really developed because pot paid so much better. We’ve become a marijuana mono-culture dependent on corrupt politicians, violent cops and greedy drug dealers all working together to exploit and oppress the American people. That’s not an economy; that’s a crime. Besides, most of the so-called “jobs” in the marijuana industry, aren’t even considered part of the economy.

Most people who make a living from marijuana, don’t pay into Social Security, and aren’t covered by Workman’s Comp, so they don’t count as being “employed.” Since they aren’t looking for work or collecting unemployment, they don’t count as “unemployed” either. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the marijuana industry has become a black hole that sucks people and money out of the economy and leaves a trail of poverty, addiction and death in it’s wake.

We don’t have prosperity here. We have organized crime. What’s the difference? In prosperity: people have jobs and homes and their kids get enough to eat and learn how to succeed in the world. In organized crime, people go missing and turn up dead, honest work is for suckers, and kids become addicted to drugs, and commit suicide. The difference is pretty stark really. The only way to avoid seeing the difference is to measure the cash flow exclusively. Even from that perspective, organized crime doesn’t really look like prosperity; organized crime just looks as attractive as prosperity to people who don’t care about anything but money.

Here, you could always make more money growing weed than you could make doing anything else, so growing marijuana became a “no brainer” for people around here. Consequently, we have a lot of “no brainer” type people who feel entitled to middle-class incomes and lifestyles, but have no education or skills outside of herb gardening. We’ve been overrun by dull, greedy people who believe that cannabis is the only thing of value. They don’t mind being one-trick-ponies, even if it is a kind of a dirty trick, but most of us have more potential than that.

It’s been about 10 years since Anna Hamilton first asked the question: “What’s After Pot?” The unanimous response from the community has been “More Pot!” Instead of beginning a movement to diversify our economy, people treated Anna’s wake-up call as the shot from a starting pistol that signaled the beginning of the greenrush. Everyone doubled-down on dope, but now the pressure is on.

Small growers get squeezed, and everyone’s profit margins shrink, as big players with deep pockets gamble for control of the legal cannabis market. As more states legalize cannabis, and bring industrial scale production online, the price of raw cannabis continues to drop. Downward pressure on the price of cannabis opens up more economic potential by multiplying the opportunities for value added cannabis products. The new openness of the legal market means that there’s a whole world of cannabis lifestyle products and service tie-ins to explore. However, lower prices for raw cannabis means that Humboldt County’s marijuana windfall will evaporate.

There’s plenty of economic potential here in SoHum for anyone with the imagination, ingenuity and drive to realize it. Unfortunately, 40 years of cannabis windfall has pretty much bred the imagination, ingenuity and drive out of us. Instead of facing reality and working together as a community to diversify and humanize our economy, we’re all busy milking the War on Drugs right to the last drop. The question is: What is the last drop for you? Is it $800 a pound? $500? $300? How low can you go, and still make money from weed in Humboldt County?

You can get more for your weed if you sell it retail, and work it into our tourism appeal, but then you have to be prepared for a whole bunch of unruly young people coming here to get high. We have that now, and it’s the thing people complain most about. If we want this area to remain famous for herb, and you still want to make a living from it, we’ll need to be more accommodating to pot smokers of all stripes, especially the young and unkempt.

To sell herb retail, in a legal market, Humboldt County needs to be as accommodating to unkempt hippies as fast food retailers are to obese people, or bartenders are to alcoholics. It comes with the territory. If the idea of graciously serving hippies with dogs and backpacks and making them feel at home seems repugnant to you, maybe you weren’t cut out for the marijuana industry after all. Around here, we don’t recognize our economic potential. Instead, we call the cops on it, beat it senseless on the town square, and convene town meetings on how to get rid of it.

If we suffer massive unemployment or economic hardship because of falling cannabis prices, it is only because the windfall from the War on Drugs blinded us to our true economic potential and robbed us of our moxie. If we succeed in this new legal environment, it will be because enough of us realized that we have other skills and talents that we never called on, because we always had marijuana. We may find that those skills and talents lead us in new directions and towards more satisfying lives. In that respect, falling marijuana prices just might be the best thing that ever happened to us.

One of the things I despise most about the War on Drugs is the people you have to associate with to find weed on the black market. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life hanging out with people I would have rather not known, in order to buy pot. When I was in high school, I used to get weed from a guy who lived in a run down farmhouse behind a gas station. He seemed like a cool guy, and I wanted to like him. I thought the colorful bantam chickens that ran around the yard, and that he cared for, made him more endearing.

At the time, I thought cock fighting was as arcane and anachronistic as bear-baiting. Then, one time, I visited his place, and he made me wait, to watch him spar two roosters. He put the two roosters on the ground in the corner of the barn. They immediately became aggressive and attacked each other in a flurry of feathers and kicks. Within a couple of minutes, one of the roosters had punctured the other rooster’s lung with a kick of his hind foot spur. The injured rooster coughed and spat blood.

The guy separated the two birds before the injured bird died, but not before killing my buzz, and my appetite. This was the only guy I knew who sold weed at the time. The last time I visited him, he had the ugliest dog I had ever seen, chained to a tree in the front yard. The dog barked ferociously. He told me it was a “pit bull.” I had never seen one before. I hoped I would never see one again. By this time, he still sold weed, but was more into coke, and he was the first person to offer to sell me cocaine.

After high school, I got my own place, a room, in Akron OH, near Akron U, and started my first cannabis garden. I’ve mostly grown my own weed ever since, but, like most people, I’ve had to move several times, or for other reasons found it impractical to grow at times.

For a while, I bought weed from an older biker in Akron. His place was almost a drive-through. You had to get out of your car and go knock on the door, but once you stepped inside it was strictly business. You told him what you wanted, gave him your money, and he pointed you towards a microwave oven, in which sat a bowl of quarter-ounce bags of weed.

I wanted to like the guy, because he had weed, but his priorities were all wrong, from my perspective. He had a brand new big TV, front and center, but only a shitty stereo, in the corner, and no good records. Artwork on the wall featured almost naked, unnaturally top-heavy women posing on unnaturally clean machines. This, despite the fact that he shared the home with his wife and school age daughter. It seemed like a pitiful situation to me. He had a brand new Harley, while I walked to work to my job as a busboy, and I gave him at least a quarter of my weekly earnings for a while. Still, I felt sorry for the guy.

There was a time when I got weed from gaunt, hollow, hard-looking man who visited my home. He would invariably arrive wearing a long-sleeve flannel shirt, unbuttoned, and would use one hand to hold the bottom of the T-shirt he wore underneath, up, forming a pouch over his sunken belly. He’d come in, look around furtively, sit down, and then open up that pouch into his lap, revealing a jumble of prescription bottles, plastic baggies and cash.

He always seemed disorganized and paranoid, and tried to up-sell me on narcotics and coke. He told me how fun they were. I never felt tempted. He seemed to like those drugs himself, and to me, he did not look well, and he did not seem fun. I remember being eager for him to leave. He seemed to think the cops were after him, and I sure didn’t want them to find him in my place.

Then, for a little while, I got weed from a guy who lived with his wife and three kids, in a two-bedroom apartment in a subsidized housing project. We hung out in one of the bedrooms, which had been converted into a sick, hip-hop recording studio fully decorated in Gangsta. One room, packed full of high-tech gadgets and dripping with bling, abject poverty crying in the next room. It creeped me out.

Not everyone I got weed from was that bad, but those are the memorable ones. Mostly, the pot dealers I knew were simply more acquisitive, materialistic and conventional than I am. They like weighing things on scales, and measure values in grams, ounces and pounds. I feel silly performing weird religious rites over a commodity, so I hardly ever weigh the pot I grow and I value other things, like character, hard work, and creative originality more than stuff.

To be fair, I did, for a little while, get weed from a delightful, and inspiring guy I knew in Boston. I don’t consider him a drug dealer, because I had to give him money, up-front, before he could go and get weed for me. He was a classically trained musician, who had played oboe in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra for a while. When I knew him, he made his living by busking in the Boston T, playing dixieland jazz on the saxophone.

He was an old guy, when I knew him, but I found him delightful company, and we always had plenty to talk about. He was spry, witty, and animated, and loved to paint. He always impressed me with his sensitivity, intelligence, and compassion. He was a fantastic player who loved what he did. Still is, and does, I hope. His band occasionally played fancy shindigs for the Boston elite. “Squares” he called them, really. He’s the kind of guy that made marijuana famous, and he’s as good as it gets on the black market.

I bought California sinsemilla from all of these people. This is what the black market looks like, and if you grow weed, these are your distributors. It’s ugly, and it’s dangerous, and it’s not exactly the kind of place you want your kids to hang out. There is nothing cool about being a drug dealer, and most of the drug dealers I have known, have not been very cool people. We need safe access to marijuana at prices that put the black market out of business. It’s time to legalize marijuana and end this creepshow once and for all.

The more they try to beautify this town, the uglier it gets. The people with money in Garberville think they can cover up injustice with a fancy new facade, and blot out dysfunction with a fresh coat of paint, but the more they try to cover it up and push it away, the more their ugliness sticks out like a sore thumb. We see it in the hideous orange fence that surrounds the Town Square, excluding everyone from our central commons, and now we see more of it in actions taken against Tigerlilly Books.

Tigerlilly Books, also known as Paul’s Bookstore, at the North End of Garberville is the last surviving hippie business in Garberville. Paul Encimer has been a pillar of this community for decades, and few people have done more to serve the community than he has. In fact, that’s why landlords Childs, Hodges, and Sinoway and their Manager Jenny Edwards say they are evicting him.

In the “Two Week Notice” dated 9/23/16, they claim that Paul is in violation of his lease because “the premises are being used to store and distribute goods other than books.” Further, they demand that he “must not store food, clothing, or items/provisions other than those that relate to a bookstore and not to distribute such items from the premises.” Paul, and his recently deceased wife Kathy, have, for decades, helped match donations to needs in this community, through their bookstore,

…and Paul still maintains a community free box in front of his store. If you have extra coats, blankets, tents or sleeping bags, Paul knows who needs them. Apparently, charity is grounds for eviction in Garberville.

By far the biggest distribution of food that happens at Paul’s Bookstore is the, once-a-month, Mountain People’s Food Buying Club. Members of the club order food from a catalog, at wholesale prices, and once a month, a truck unloads a pallet of groceries in front of the bookstore. The whole club helps unload it and sort it all out. This cooperative community grocery project rose out of the ashes of the long defunct Co-op in Ruby Valley, which Paul was also involved with. The Co-op in Ruby Valley was a central hub of back-to-the-land, hippie culture, back in the day, and when the Co-op went under, that culture retreated to Paul’s Bookstore. Paul doesn’t just run a bookstore, he keeps that culture alive.

Besides being THE place to pick up a book, meet the cool people in town, and catch up on the latest gossip, Paul’s Bookstore has cultural and historical significance. For a short time, after the rednecks killed the Indians and cut down all of the trees, but before the dope yuppies sucked the salmon streams dry, a bunch of idealistic young people, called “hippies,” inspired by new ideas and psychedelic drugs, moved out here to escape the rat race, and to learn to live differently. Those back-to-the-land hippies gave us alternative energy, owner-built homes, composting toilets, organic farming and California sinsemilla. Paul cultivates the last surviving remnant population of “back-to-the-land” hippies in SoHum, at his bookstore in Garberville.

The achievements born from this brief flowering of a creative counterculture stand in stark contrast to the long, dark history of violence, exploitation, and stupidity that otherwise characterize the history of white settlement in this area.

For this reason alone, we should preserve hippie culture wherever we find it, but we’ve been told, time and time again, that hippie culture is the key to our economic future as well. Will we ever learn? Today, hippie culture has all but vanished from the hills, but it still survives at Paul’s Bookstore in Garberville, at least for now.

Paul’s bookstore keeps hippie culture alive, and reminds us of what community looks like. Not only does Paul keep his shelves stocked with the ideas that shape hippie thinking, he also lives up to the ideals of hippie culture. He has opposed every war since Vietnam. He still has the sea turtle costume he wore in the “Battle for Seattle” WTO Protest, and he has chained himself down inside his congressman’s office. Paul has organized free meals, and run emergency shelters. Paul is a fountain of knowledge about hippie culture, community organizing and non-violent resistance, and he’s all too eager to share that knowledge with anyone who’ll listen.

Today, the dope yuppies circle him like sharks. Drug dealers dominate the local culture now, and they bring an entirely different set of values from those of the hippies. Drug dealers don’t care about community. That’s why they became drug dealers in the first place. Drug dealers only care about making money, and drug dealers like to show off their money.

Drug dealers care a lot about their “image” because they can’t talk too much about what they do for a living, and because dealing drugs is a pretty low-status job. So, drug dealers use their money to appear wealthy and sophisticated, and to draw attention away from the the very sleazy nature of their business. It’s the same way with strip clubs and pornography. The marque reads: “Entertainment for the Discerning Gentleman,” only because the sign reading “Live Nude Girls” brought in enough money to renovate the club. They didn’t change what they did for a living, they just changed their image.

Now that a new cadre of greedy, image-conscious, dope yuppies have taken to laundering their money through Garberville’s downtown, they’ve declared war on anyone who doesn’t have the look they’re looking for. They’ve made it clear that they don’t want no commie food club or hippie free box in their town, and they sure as hell don’t want anyone to give food, warm clothes, sleeping bags or tents to people who need them. They want to get as far away from the “hippie” look as possible, and Paul just doesn’t fit into their sharp new upscale image of Downtown Garberville.

It’s not enough that Sohum’s drug dealers exterminate charity in their own heart, they insist on sterilizing the whole town. When they say, “Oh, I’m sorry, we don’t have any services for poor people down here in SoHum,” they say it like it’s a strange coincidence. They should say “We’re greedy pricks here in SoHum. We don’t share, and we like to bully people. If we find you asleep, anywhere in this town, we just might beat you to death with a stick, just for kicks. Not only that, if anyone in this town tries to help you, we will crush them. That’s how little we care and how much we want you gone.”

You can’t build real prosperity from greed, injustice and exploitation, and you can’t escape the poverty created by the War on Drugs. The profits of prohibition are cursed. The skeletons hidden behind the new faux-stone facade going up downtown, and the bodies buried under the Garberville Town Square will haunt this town for generations. Paul’s bookstore on the other hand, stands as a shining beacon of hippie culture, in a vast, dark, violent sea of predators and bottom-feeders. As a community, we can’t afford to lose it.

I do not enjoy criticizing local nonprofits, but the recent controversy around the the Mateel Community Center’s choice to book “Murder Music” superstar, Sizzla, to headline this year’s Reggae on the River deserves a bit more attention, because it points out some of the pitfalls of importing someone else’ culture rather than developing our own.

I’ve never understood the local fascination with Reggae Music. I love Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff. I’ve heard some other reggae music that I liked a lot, but I’ve heard more insipid, preachy, banal and just plain lame reggae music since I’ve moved to Humboldt County than I’ve ever heard before. Listening to the radio around here often reminds me that the global reggae music machine produces plenty of pap that’s every bit as vapid as the American Top 40, as well as religiously themed pop music that rivals Christian Rock, for subtlety and depth.

I have deep respect for Rastafarian culture. It’s not my culture, but I respect Rastafarian history, tradition, beliefs, and religion. I know that a lot of people find their strength in Rastafarianism, and I think that’s a beautiful thing, for them. I am not the son of the son of an African slave. I do not live in poverty in a violent ghetto on the outskirts of a tropical resort city built to serve rich white tourists, and I do not know whether Emperor Haile Salassie is the messiah or not, but he doesn’t mean a lot to me personally.

Like Christianity, like Islam, like Judaism, many people take Rastafarianism seriously, and receive a lot of personal strength from it. Like Christianity, Islam and Judaism, Rastafarianism has apparently spawned some embarrassingly popular, if not seriously threatening, fundamentalists. It happens to every religion, it seems. I mean, what’s the point of finding your personal strength, if you can’t use it to whip some non-believer’s ass once in a while?

Dance hall music star, Sizzla, obviously enjoys tremendous popularity among reggae music fans, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his strong belief that homosexuality is evil. According to Sizzla, homosexuality is so evil that it is OK to kill homosexuals. In fact, he thinks it’s a good idea to kill homosexuals, and he wants to kill homosexuals. We know that he feels this way because he’s written these sentiments into the lyrics of his songs and stated as much on stage.

A lot of religions have issues with homosexuality, if not sexuality in general. I don’t understand why religions focus so much time and energy on telling people what not to eat and who not to have sex with, but I think it at least partially explains why most of us are not particularly religious, and why the people who cling to religion the most are often people who don’t get enough to eat, and/or don’t have enough sex.

We all know gay people, if we’re not gay ourselves, and hopefully, all of us know that it’s NOT OK to kill gay people. I’d like to think that’s a community value we all share around here, but you never know what kinds of ideas people nurture in the privacy of their own minds. For instance, if Sizzla were notorious for his calls for violence against bankers, or real estate tycoons, or drug dealers, I wouldn’t be writing this column. Instead, I’d be writing about this great show I just saw, and about an inspiring artist who tells it like it is.

Apparently, that’s how reggae fans see Sizzla. His message resonates with people. I don’t get it, but Sizzla’s music means something to a lot of people. He is highly revered in Jamaica not only as a prolific artist, but also as a community leader, and a strong voice in the Rastafarian movement. Many people here in the US want to hear his message too. I don’t understand Sizzla’s appeal any more than I understand his hatred of gay people, but that’s OK.

There are lot’s of things about lots of cultures that I don’t understand, but I do understand why you might not want to invite Sizzla to play at your community event, especially if you value the gay people in your community. I’m not worried about other cultures; I’m worried about the culture of this community. Here, in Humboldt County, we value gay people. We appreciate the contribution they make to our society, the diversity they bring to our community, and we love them as friends and family. I would think that this would make Sizzla a very poor choice to headline our biggest community event of the year.

The Mateel Community Center was well aware of Sizzla’s anti-gay rhetoric. A similar controversy erupted several years ago when a private promoter booked Buju Banton to play at the Mateel Hall. A protest erupted and the show was canceled. At that time Sizzla was already recognized as one of eight reggae artists labeled “Murder Music” for their blatant endorsement of violence against gay people. The Mateel also knew that booking Sizzla would sell a lot of tickets.

As it turned out, Sizzla’s infamous hatred of the LGBTQ community made him an irresistible bargain for any promoter willing to invite him into the US. The Mateel Community Center, working with the few promoters who were willing to weather the inevitable shit-storm of criticism, made it possible for Sizzla to tour the US for the first time in seven years, and he kicked off that tour at Reggae on the River.

We smoke as much weed as Rastas, and we have as much hair as Rastas, but we’re not Rastas. We’re Hippies. Remember? We were once a persecuted minority united by a spiritual ideal too, but we believe in free love. We had some other ideals too, but we’re all still pretty much on board with the idea that any kind of sex is cool, so long as everyone involved in it is an adult, and wants it. Our “local culture” remains fairly amorphous, but I feel safe in saying that we’re a fairly sex-positive community. Come to think of it, we might have a more distinct cultural identity if we didn’t try so hard to drown it in imported Jamaican music.

Near as I can tell, weed is the only real connection between Jamaica’s Rastafarian culture and the community of Southern Humboldt. When I talk to people around here about Reggae on the River, they talk about the history of this community, and they talk about the money. They get big dollar signs in their eyes and talk about how much money it brings into the community, how all the schools and fire departments make their budget there, and they talk about how much weed they sell at it. I’ve never heard anyone around here describe it as a religious revival.

I’ve been to Reggae on the River, twice, once as a volunteer and once as a vendor. It’s been a while, but I remember that I had fun. I like getting high as much as anyone, and Reggae on the River is all about getting high, or Irie as the Rastas say. I saw a lot of white, middle-class lushes at Reggae, the kind of people you would expect to see at a hippie drug festival, but I also saw a lot of Rastas in the audience, clearly Reggae on the River means something to them too. In fact, Reggae on the River may mean more to them than it means to us, at this point.

Still, this is our community, and we have facilities like the Mateel Community Center, to promote culture, and to promote culture that supports our community values. The Mateel chose Sizzla to headline Reggae on the River because the “Murder Music” stigma made him a bargain, and that bargain made Reggae on the River profitable this year. Apparently greed is our only true community value.

Maybe values are just more trouble than they are worth. I mean, if wealthy communities like ours can’t afford them any more, and poor communities sharpen them into offensive weapons designed to kill, maybe we’re better off without them. How much different would it be, really? We’d still have plenty of vapid pop music, and tons of drugs. I’ll bet most people would hardly notice the difference.

Last year, Humboldt County instituted a a new regressive sales tax, Measure Z, that unduly burdens the poor in Humboldt County. This year, the county intends to pass a new ordinance that will infringe on our civil rights. Apparently it wasn’t enough to just send more cops out to harass the poor, which Measure Z funded, they now find it necessary to invent a new crime, for which the poor can be prosecuted. Still, no one wants to pay taxes, and no one wants to give up their rights, so how do our County Supervisors generate public support for these measures? That’s easy. They lie.

County Supervisors used the same lie for both Measure Z and this new proposed “aggressive solicitation ordinance.” That is the lie called “public safety.” Remember “public safety?” That was the lie the Federal Government used to justify marijuana prohibition too. “Public safety” is one of those big lies that fascists have used repeatedly throughout history to restrict civil rights, suppress dissent and control the public, and that’s exactly how the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors use it today. Don’t believe for one second that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors gives a rat’s ass about public safety. All you have to do is watch Estelle Fennell drive to know that public safety is the very last thing on her mind.

“Public safety” sounds like a good thing. Who doesn’t support public safety? We outlawed fireworks, so we wouldn’t have so many forest fires. We outlawed driving while intoxicated so we could cut down on the number of traffic fatalities and we mandate seat-belt use for the same reason. Those are some ways that legislators have addressed public safety concerns through legislation. We can argue whether or not these laws work, but “public safety” becomes a big lie when politicians use it, not to save lives, but to steal our money and take away our rights.

I readily admit that Humboldt County is a dangerous place to live. We face many threats to public safety here in Humboldt County, some natural, some man-made. We’re prone to earthquakes, fires, floods, tsunamis and mudslides, all of which have a long, devastating history in Humboldt County, and we can rest assured that overwhelming natural disasters will remain a predictable part of our future. We could probably save a lot of lives by spending some money now to prepare for the inevitable. In a real disaster, it would really help to have plenty of bed space in emergency shelters, and it would help even more to have people with experience running an emergency shelter, who know what to expect when disaster strikes.

Just think of the lives that could be saved in a natural disaster, if we had a full-time emergency shelter in Southern Humboldt. Think of how many people need help in times of personal emergency, and how much good it would do for the whole community to have an emergency shelter serving people in crisis as a way of preparing for the major natural disasters that will inevitably impact all of us in the future. That’s what a policy designed for “public safety” might look like. You won’t see much of that in Humboldt County.

Now ask yourself: When was the last time an “aggressive panhandler” killed anyone in Humboldt County, by panhandling too aggressively? I don’t think it has happened yet. I’m sure we would have heard about it on the news. Not one single death by “aggressive panhandling” in Humboldt County in as long as I can remember. I don’t ever recall hearing about a single injury, not even a bruise, caused by “aggressive panhandling” anywhere in Humboldt County, have you? The “public safety threat” posed by aggressive panhandling is entirely imaginary. We can only imagine how an aggressive panhandler might possibly threaten public safety, because we’ve never had a single aggressive panhandling related injury in Humboldt County in as long as anyone can remember.

On the other side of the coin, reckless drivers, like Estelle Fennell, kill and injure dozens of Humboldt County residents every year. Out-of -control drivers on the Briceland-Thorne Road constitute a serious threat to the public safety of the citizens of Southern Humboldt, but none of the money from Measure Z goes towards traffic enforcement West of Redway. Instead, the cops cruise around Redway and Garberville harassing poor people all day, poor people who do not own cars or drive cars, have not committed any crimes and do not pose any threat to public safety.

The cops themselves pose a serious threat to public safety. We have some of the most violent cops in the state. The Eureka Police Dept leads the state in police shootings, and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Dept is famous for torturing locked-down non-violent protesters by swabbing pepper-spray in their eyes. This we know for sure. Complaints and allegations of police abuse have only multiplied since then, and the EPD still refuses to turn over dash-cam video from an 2012 incident reported by Thadeus Greenson in the NCJ. Cops around here remain largely above the law which makes this threat to public safety even more insidious and dangerous.

But wait, there’s more.

Dead bodies turn-up every month or so around here, and most of these deaths appear to be connected to the black-market marijuana industry. Hash labs explode every week or so, maiming and killing residents and destroying homes all over Humboldt County, and at least a dozen people, probably more, mostly young people, die in black-market drug deals every year in Humboldt County. Hundreds more die violent premature deaths in the black-market marijuana industry across the country every year in the process of selling Humboldt County marijuana. Not only does Humboldt County’s black-market marijuana industry dramatically impact public safety here in Humboldt County, we have become a public safety menace to the rest of the country.

Speaking of black-market drug deals, we have some of the highest drug addiction and drug overdose rates in the state. We consume the equivalent of 14 Vicodin tablets every day, on average for every man, woman and child in Humboldt County, and that doesn’t include all of the heroin, meth and cocaine we consume. Drugs kill hundreds of people in Humboldt County every year. The deadly combination of an entrenched black-market coupled with our culture of addiction, poses, by far, our most serious threat to public safety here in Humboldt County, and the bright red cherry at the top of this public safety crises sundae is Hepatitis C.

Humboldt County has been recognized as the most prolific breeding-grounds for Hepatitis C in the entire USA. The Hep-C epidemic threatens to overwhelm our public health system even without a natural disaster. Despite new treatments, complications of Hepatitis C claim tens of thousands of lives across the country every year.

Welcome to the heart of the Hep-C generation, and you are welcome for that brief rundown of genuine public safety concerns that the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors could be working on at this very moment, were they not so busy lying to you, stealing your money and shutting you up. So, the next time your County Supervisor or your local newspaper tries to convince you that we need this new, unconstitutional, free-speech stifling, fascist police-state style “aggressive solicitation ordinance” in Humboldt County for “public safety” you will know, without a shadow of a doubt, that they are lying to you.

What planet is Estelle Fennell from? She sure isn’t from anywhere near Southern Humboldt, that much was apparent at last Wednesday’s 2nd District Candidates Debate. Bonny Blackberry’s Rights Monitoring Project hosted the debate, and Bonny Blackberry herself moderated the event. She still calls her organization the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, but if you’ve listened to her radio show on KMUD lately, you know that Bonny Blackberry doesn’t really care much about people’s rights anymore.

Back during the War on Drugs, I used to think the Civil Liberties Monitoring Project was one of KMUD’s best shows, a unique shining example of what community radio should be. Bonny challenged the police and held them to account. She stood up against profiling, invasive surveillance, illegal searches, and code enforcement inspections. She taught people how to invoke their rights, preserve their rights and demand their rights. She helped this community hold the police state at bay, and her work made a huge difference in how the cops around here treated people.

Not any more. Lately, Bonny just whines about the Supervisors and the Sheriff not doing enough to protect the income of so called “Mom and Pop” growers. It’s about time she changed the name of the show, or better yet, took it off the air to make room for something else. We need a good show about civil rights around here, that’s for sure, but it’s a shame to see the CLMP show go so lame, and I’m afraid it’s time to put it out of its misery.

That said, I do appreciate that Bonny put together this forum so we could hear the two candidates competing to represent us on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. Side by side, in a room full of SoHum people, the contrast was remarkable. We have a unique culture here in Southern Humboldt. We look at the world differently, and we think differently. We look at the world differently, and we think differently, because we smoke the best weed in the world, all day long, every day, or at least we did, for long enough. For all of our many differences, cannabis unites us, enlightens us, and makes us who we are.

Which leads me to wonder: Where is Estelle from? Even during her long tenure as the voice of KMUD’s Local News, Estelle sounded so unlike anyone else I’ve met in SoHum that I could scarcely believe the News was really local. I knew that the stuff she reported happened around here, but I didn’t know anyone around here who talked like her. Listening to Estelle at Wednesday night’s debate reminded me of her days as KMUD’s news anchor.

On the News, Estelle spoke in complete sentences built for efficiency. There were no flowery hippie colloquialisms, no Rastafarian religious references, no expletives or imitation ghetto slang in her reports. She asked relevant questions and sometimes even follow-up questions. No one around here does that, and no matter how many strange occurrences she reported, Estelle never suggested that the freemasons, Jewish bankers, the Catholic Church, Skull and Bones, the CIA, FBI, aliens, or even an alignment of celestial bodies was responsible. Who was she protecting?

More importantly: Who was she working for? Estelle lost her job at KMUD because of her blatantly slanted coverage of the Reggae Wars. Estelle went to the mat for crooked concert promoter Carol Bruno, in an embarrassing, unsuccessful attempt to quell public outrage over the fact that Bruno had just swindled the Mateel Community Center out of a quarter of a million dollars. Estelle’s hidden agenda only became too obvious to ignore when she dove deep into the muck in that last ditch effort to save Momma Moneybags.

I told you last week what I thought of Journalism. Well, the only people who lie more than journalists, are lawyers and politicians. Estelle decided to skip law school. Instead she found a new puppet master in a cadre of greedy developers who used their money and her slick low-key delivery to take over the Board of Supervisors.

Once there, she helped them secure gigantic subsidies for their McMansion developments, and raised taxes on the poorest people in the county to pay for it. Then she screwed over the back-to-the-landers, who put her in office in the first place, and sold out to greedy mega-grow greenrushers, giving them a green light to destroy the environment and ruin our quality of life with the recently passed medical marijuana ordinance.

That’s her record. She’s a liar for hire, and just like when she worked at KMUD, she draws a paycheck from us all, but she only really works for the ones who pull the strings. She’s been playing the rest of us for rubes for decades. Why would she stop now?

Bud Rogers, on the other hand, revealed himself as a true man-of-the-people at last Wednesday’s debate. His sentences may run on for weeks without reaching conclusion, but you can tell by listening to him that Bud Rogers smokes a lot of really good weed. We need someone who smokes a lot of good weed on the Board of Supervisors. The Supervisor from the Second District should have a bong on his desk (I know I would). We should insist that our Supervisor use it, religiously, before every meeting.

It’s hard to lie convincingly when you are stoned. Most stoners are too lazy to even try. That’s the beauty of cannabis. Cannabis reminds you that telling the truth is easier than lying. We should insist that the 2nd District Supervisor get absolutely wrecked on some of SoHum’s best cannabis before every Supervisors meeting, just to keep them honest. Bud Rogers could handle it. You know he could.

We need more Bud on the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors. We need an honest stoner to represent Southern Humboldt. If you don’t smoke weed every day, all day, you have no business representing this community. You just don’t get it. You’re not one of us. Bud Rogers is one of us.

Like you, Bud Rogers smokes a lot of really good weed. Like you, Bud Rogers loves living in the woods. He doesn’t want to go to the courthouse in Eureka any more than you or I do, but unlike you and me, Bud Rogers is willing to drive to that goddamned courthouse every fucking week, and listen to everybody’s complaints, and do his level best to make the best sausage possible for the people of Southern Humboldt, because he cares about us, and he cares about this place.

Bud has graciously made this sacrifice for the people of Southern Humboldt because no one else would step up to the plate. You can tell by listening to him how much Bud loves this community, and he doesn’t like what’s been happening around here with Estelle in the driver’s seat. None of us do. We’re sick of the mega-grows and the generators and don’t like the new ordinance that encourages them. We’re sick of the war against the poor, and endless hand-wringing about our lack of housing, and we’re sick of greedy land developers pulling the strings of our elected representative in Eureka.

We need Bud Rogers now more than ever. It’s time we put one of our own in the 2nd District Supervisors seat, instead of some slick-talking alien with a hidden agenda. With Bud Rogers in the Supervisors seat, SoHum will never again be taken unawares by Annunaki lizard people bent on enslaving humanity. Bud Rogers is hip to their M.O. He knows who’s seeding the clouds and he recognizes the secret handshake of the New World Order. Don’t let anyone tell you that these are not concerns for the County Board of Supervisors. The Illuminauti work at every level, and Bud Rogers is the only candidate willing to face their looming menace.

I don’t know why, but I just feel the spirits calling Bud to shake off the old paradigm and lead our consciousness to a whole new spiritual level. Like the Lion of Judah, Bud Rogers will smite the lies of Babylon with righteous herb and bring peace, justice and freedom to Jah people of SoHum. Shit man, you gotta vote for Bud bro, he’s your homeboy. However you say it, Bud Rogers is the best choice we have for 2nd District Supervisor, and it’s up to us to give him the job.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)